Obama signs order supporting Syria's rebels, reports say

Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorising US support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.

Obama's order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence finding broadly permits the CIA and other US agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.

This and other developments signal a shift toward growing, albeit still circumscribed, support for Assad's armed opponents – a shift that intensified following last month's failure of the UN security council to agree on tougher sanctions against the Damascus government.

The White House is for now apparently stopping short of giving the rebels lethal weapons, even as some US allies do just that.

7. you have a naive and child like understanding of the situation

Now why do you think almost all Syrians Christians and other ethnic minorities are backing Assad? Because they are evil? Why do you think the Saudis are by far the strongest supporters of Assad's opposition? Because they want to spread freedom and democracy?

11. Did someone take a poll of the people of Syria?

12. no and that is the point. It is naive to imagine that Syrians are all of one mind. They are deeply

divided - usually along ethnic, religious and tribal lines. It is no more true that the Syrians "People" are backing Assad then it is true that the Syrian "people" are backing the opposition. It's a lot more complicated than that. Throwing our support behind the largely Saudi sponsored - Sunni dominated anti-Assad militias is walking into one hell of a hornets nest.

13. no reliable poll that is for sure and that is the point. It is no more true that the Syrian "people"

are supporting Assad than it is true that the Syrian "people are supporting the largely Saudi sponsored and Sunni dominated opposition. Actively supporting the largely Saudi sponsored and Sunni dominated opposition at the expense of the all the various other communities in Syrian would be a mistake of catastrophic proportions and would only prolong the suffering, increase the slaughter and make any transition to a viable and stable order all the less likely.

5. Liberals arguing that the U.S. should give weapons to Syrian rebels underestimate Assad's power

This is not a knee-jerk left-wing response. It has nothing to do with Iraq. Nor does it have anything to do with the proxy war between the U.S. and its allies and Iran and its allies. It is not driven by pacifism or opposition to all war. All U.S. wars are not axiomatically foolish, evil or driven by brutal self-interest (although most of them since World War II have been). The airstrikes on Kosovo and the Libya campaign were justified (although the jury is still out on the latter intervention). If arming the Syrian opposition would result in fewer deaths and a faster transition to a peaceful, open, democratic society, we should arm them.

That analysis has been provided by a number of in-depth reports, most notably a new study by the International Crisis Group, as well as the excellent on-the-ground reporting of Nir Rosen for Al-Jazeera. The bottom line is simple. The war has become a zero-sum game for Assad. If he loses, he dies. But the only way he can lose is if he is abandoned by his crucial external patron, Russia, which is extremely unlikely to happen absent some slaughter so egregious that Moscow feels it has to cut ties with him. Assad has sufficient domestic support to hold on for a long time, and a huge army that is not likely to defect en masse. Under these circumstances, giving arms to the rebels, however much it may make conscience-stricken Western observers feel better, will simply make the civil war much bloodier and its outcome even more chaotic and dangerous.

The key point concerns Assad’s domestic support. Contrary to the widely held belief that most Syrians support the opposition and are opposed to the Assad regime, Syrians are in fact deeply divided. The country’s minorities – the ruling Alawites, Christians and Druze – tend to support the regime, if only because they fear what will follow its downfall. (The grocery on my corner in San Francisco is owned by a Christian Syrian from a village outside Damascus. When I asked him what he thought about what was going on in his country, he said, “It’s not like what you see on TV. Assad is a nice guy. He’s trying to do the right thing.”) As Rosen makes clear, Syria’s ruling Alawite minority is the key to Assad’s survival: Absent an outside invasion, the regime will not fall unless the Alawites turn on it. But the Alawites fear reprisals if the Sunni-dominated opposition, some of whose members have threatened to “exterminate the Alawites,” defeats the Assad regime. The fear of a sectarian war, exacerbated by the murky and incoherent nature of the opposition, means that the minorities are unlikely to join the opposition in large numbers.

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Our national instinct is to come riding to the rescue. It goes against our character to simply sit on our hands. Our sincere, naive and self-centered belief that America can fix everything, and our equally sincere, naive and self-centered belief that moral outrage justifies intervention, is a powerful tide, pulling us toward getting directly involved in Syria’s civil war.

But in the real world, we cannot always come riding to the rescue. Sometimes, we have no choice but to watch tragedy unfold, because anything we do will create an even bigger tragedy.

6. Look, for the last 50 years or so, we have supported the strongmen in the middle east...

We were behind Saddam, The Shah and anyone else who would keep their people quiet so we could get their oil.

Now that we are helping "liberate", loosely speaking, the people just might start recognizing that the US truly has their best interests in mind.

It's going to take a long time but the only way we can get the people in these countries into the 21st century is to get the idea of the strongman out of the way.

It won't take as long as we expect, once the control from the top is loosened and the people feel empowered and part of the country, have a legitimate stake in their country, they will look toward stability. The only way to get there is to get rid of the strongman mentality.

8. What is so great about the 21st century?

If a country is not in a US style democracy does that mean they are not in the 21st century? I apologize for turning your words around a little but a lot of cultures were just fine for hundreds of years before the US came onto the scene. I think the "strongman" thing is a relatively recent invention. Probably having to do with foreign aid and billions of dollars.

24. There is no reason to believe that Sunni dominated militias running the country would be better for

the Syrian people. The Christians, Druze, and of course the Alawite minorities very much and very legitimately fear reprisal. In the very best case scenario we would almost certainly see long protracted sectarian battles every bit as bloody and horrific as what we saw in Iraq. I don't think Israeli state security concerns would be reassured by having an unstable and uncontrollable country on its northern boarder. For all the bad blood that exist between the Assad regime and the Israeli state - they have on a number of occasions reached points of understanding. In fact during periods of the Lebanese civil war they were at times unofficial but expo facto allies. This situation of a very unstable regime to the north with no way to know who will dominate is not something that would bring Israeli state security concerns any comfort.

25. It's got to be better than it is now....

15. Of course the CIA is being authorized to seek to depose Assad... and the explanation is simple

and cogently stated on the Syrian Wiki:

"For ideological reasons, privatization of government enterprises is explicitly rejected. Therefore major sectors of the economy including refining, ports operation, air transportation, power generation, and water distribution, remain firmly controlled by the government." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria , the economy section)

There's profit to be had in privatizing the oil, as well as other, industries in Syria... and if it takes a war to find someone to privatize the industries... well then there will also be reconstruction projects to be funded from those oil dollars, won't there?

Does this sound familiar?

Combined with the above posted material regarding the sentiments of the Alawi Muslim population in the face of the Saudi supported (and therefore almost certainly Sunni extremist) rebel forces... I feel like I'm getting a shot of dèjá vu.